Athens, Georgia

Last weekend I went to visit Ari in Athens, Georgia. I’ve never been to Athens before nor have I, or Ari for that matter, been in a home that was entirely Ari’s. That gal has always lived in dorms or crowded apartments, always sharing a kitchen and bathroom with some gremlin undoubtedly less organized than Ari herself.

Sometime around high school Ari developed a morbid fascination of sorts. The girl likes road kill and carcasses. On our daily dog walks through the neighborhood she would observe flattened squirrels and the remaining feathers of fallen birds and other indiscernible creatures. One time we found a dead deer in the marsh and I nearly had to swat her curious hands away from the maggot filled corpse.

Despite these things I should tell you that’s she’s wonderfully girly and always has painted nails and red lips. She has the cutest little giggle, a button nose, and an extensive (and expensive) shoe collection. 

So naturally her home is adorned with bleached white animal skulls and glass frames filled with insect wings, dried flowers, and a wholly in-tact lizard she found dead, dried, and miraculously preserved in her parent’s garage. Also adorning her walls are posters from various New Orleans Jazz festivals and some moody black and white photography. Who could resist such a girl?

Her house was cozy and delightfully lived in but also felt like a history museum or an archeological showroom that housed succulents and cactus and an unexpected gardenia bush, furniture made of driftwood and warm earthy colors.

I met her and her classmates at a little bar downtown. They all talked causally about their classes and upcoming projects while Ari and I whispered to each other about memory lane. They are all studying Landscape Architecture and are currently in a class devoted entirely to learning the nicknames and Latin names of several hundred plants.

Ari told me that she had just learned the Latin name for our Meeting Tree. The Meeting Tree is in fact the tree exactly between our houses where Ari and I would meet when we wanted to play together. We would climb and swing from its branches while we discussed our plan for the day and then we would dash off and not think of the Tree again until tomorrow. We loved The Meeting Tree dearly and only stopped meeting there when her parents built a fence on her side of it when we were in high school. I wrote a sad poem about The Meeting Tree and we moved our planning sessions to the much less lyrical mailbox between our driveways.

“Ligustrum Japonicum.” she told me. “It’s an invasive though.”

We spent the weekend walking through the chilly weather, along train tracks and through town, stopping a few times for pastries and coffee. We talked the whole weekend and spent our last night together on her fold-out couch watching a Hugh Grant movie and eating chips, popcorn, and Reese’s cups.

During one night out with her classmates we walked briskly through downtown Athens, making our way to the part of town where the grad students hang out, several blocks away from the humongous mob of scantily clad undergraduates who were slurring and staggering and shivering. I’ve never seen so many kids in one place and I did not like it. We hid in a dark little bar with some truly horrendous, kindergarten style artwork on the walls. Ari and I were able to convince her classmates that this awful art was hers and we were delighted watching them stagger over insincere compliments and a panicked confusion. The best part was how sweet they were.

“It’s goo…it’s way better than I could do!” one said.

“I didn’t know you do art.” another mentioned. I overheard them whispering about all chipping in to buy it to make Ari happy.

Rather than complimenting her work they avoided it all together and asked about the process of having your art submitted to venues and also what inspired her. Ari held a straight face as she answered questions and I stood by ready to blurt out all the crap I learned in art school in case she paused for too long.

“I think it’s a representation of social status.” I said of the piece. It was three clear plastic balls with green pipe-cleaners inside, all handing from a piece of wood. 

“Interesting.” they replied. We waited a whole day before we told them the truth and they were blatantly relived though they never once admitted that it was terrible, terrible art.

On our walk back from the Art Bar they pointed out plants they knew and would all crowd around bushes and pluck leaves from ones they weren’t sure of. Drunk undergraduates would hover around them to see what they were so focused on. It confused all of them and the doubt on their faces seemed pained as though they suddenly questioned how many drinks they’d consumed in the last hour.

“Those are leaves.” one boy told us urgently.

The next day I had the most college experience ever and I tailgated for a football game. I did not understand the big deal at first because it seems to me that there are football games on constantly. I was ticked to walk past every house to find people wearing Georgia colors, standing in their front yards drinking and playing corn-hole at ten in the morning. I thought tailgating was performed exclusively in parking lots outside of football stadiums. It wasn’t until 3:00 that day that I suddenly realized that tailgating is the term for preemptive celebrating and that people want to spend their whole day doing that and nothing else. 

“So it’s really just a party? And then you watch a football game?” I asked Ari and even she was stunned by my ignorance.

Ari’s friends were amused by my oblivion to college life. I managed to attend two colleges without football teams, I knew not a single drinking game, and I openly discussed my aversion to further education. In addition to these things I was the only person wearing a fur lined coat and shivering while we stood in the yard and threw bean bags at plywood.

“Are you cold?” they asked me as though it’s unfathomable that a poorly insulated girl from the beach might be cold in the foothills of the north Georgia mountains.

“What’s it to ya, sparky?” I snapped at a fella from Colorado who was wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

Then to my horror, as everyone left the porch littered with beer cans and uneaten pizza to attended the game, some guy says, “I’ve got an extra ticket or two. Do y’all want to go?” and due to peer pressure I told Ari I didn’t care and due to peer pressure she thought we should go take a look. So somehow we wound up at the Georgia game and I was so encumbered by sounds and lights that I don’t think I watched a single play nor did I notice what team they were playing. 

We stayed about forty-five minutes and then Ari looked at me and I looked at her and we knew we felt the same. We walked back to her house, stealing a pizza from our tailgating hosts porch, and settling in for some quality time with Hugh Grant. 

My last point of note is how gorgeous the drive to Athens is once you hop off the Interstate. The last hour of that drive is through a windy back road lined with red and yellow trees and farms and green plains. And what a gift that Ari was waiting for me at the end of it.